In late 2005, I travelled there to see it for myself. I stayed at the small American base in Lashkar Gah, the low-rise provincial capital, partly because there was already an advance British team there and I was hoping to find out more about their plans. They included soldiers, diplomats and intelligence officers.
Pashtun-majority Helmand had been an important source of recruits for the Taliban in the past and it has an even longer history of tribal feuds and land disputes, exacerbated by the communist era and the civil war. But in the early 2000s, the provincial governor appointed by President Karzai was keeping a lid on these tensions.
Sher Mohammad Akhundzada was a warlord figure with a predatory reputation and a puppeteer’s command over tribal politics. His father had been governor before him; his uncle was a celebrated mujahideen commander. Sher Mohammad ran Helmand as his own fiefdom, employing patronage and violence, underwritten by government funds, but also – it was widely reported – by profits from the local drugs trade.
One afternoon, I watched as Sher Mohammad lectured a gathering of tribal elders about the evils of cultivating opium. He was going through the motions of rallying support for a Western-funded initiative to encourage farmers to grow more wheat and other legal crops instead of opium poppy. “It’s against the law and we need to stop doing this,” the governor said.
Seated under a colourful sun awning strung over the yard of Sher Mohammad’s compound, the elders looked bored. Some were dozing. One stood up to offer an old excuse for farming poppies. “Opium is not outlawed in the Qur’an,” he said. “But alcohol and prostitution are, and the government is doing nothing to stop this.” The governor smiled, but didn’t engage.
Sher Mohammad had quick, darting eyes, on constant alert. He was only in his thirties at the time.
“It’s good to see you here,” he said, unconvincingly, when I was introduced, but he talked the talk on drugs. British forces needed “to stop smuggling across the border with Pakistan,” he said. What I didn’t know then was that the Americans had searched his compound around that time and found a substantial cache of opium there – enough to make several million dollars’ worth of heroin. He later claimed it was a store of confiscated drugs that was due to be destroyed.
Privately, US officers described the governor as ‘totally corrupt’. But one said, “We need him right now.” Helmand was a backwater for the Americans then, and they were content to have him keep the peace in his own rough-handed way. The governor was no model of governance, but he wasn’t challenging Karzai’s authority.
As it geared up for its expedition to Helmand, the Blair government saw the situation through a London lens. It could not have its soldiers working with a suspected narco baron, especially as it was also supposed to be fighting the drugs trade. Sher Mohammad had picked up the signals. “Don’t say bad things about me,” he warned me after we spoke.
Locals who had heard the British were coming had their own lens, tinted by the past. “Why are the Angrez coming?” several people asked me when I visited Lashkar Gah’s main bazaar with a translator. Angrez is the Pashto word for the English. I tried to explain the goals of the British as best as I understood them, but I had no idea how my answers sounded when they were passed on in Pashto.
A few weeks after my trip to Helmand, I heard that Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, or SMA, as the British called him, had been replaced. But they did not secure the Helmand governor’s cooperation. He was left stewing with resentment and a lot of armed men he could no longer afford to pay. This meant that even before the main UK force deployed, an important segment of opinion was against them. It also created a fertile audience for the narrative that the British were invading.
Speaking a few years later, Sher Mohammad confirmed that he had subsequently encouraged his men to switch sides. “The government stopped paying for the people who supported me,” he said. “I sent 3,000 of them off to the Taliban because I could not afford to support them, but the Taliban was making payments.”
Afghanistan Peace Campaign